United States
law stipulates that prescription drugs be tested on
animals. The belief is that the injection of an experimental drug into an
animal will yield information about that drugs efficacy, toxicity
and safety. It does, but the information is only relevant to the
animalspecies tested in the experiment.
This information can not be safely or accurately
applied to humans, or any other species for that matter.

Accord to U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt,
“Currently, nine out of ten experimental drugs fail in clinical studies because we cannot accurately predict how they will behave in people based on laboratory and animal studies.”1 This was echoed by Food and Drug Administration Commissioner
Andrew C. von Eschenbach, MD... "Consider just one stark statistic: Today, nine out of 10 compounds developed in the lab fail in human studies. They fail, in large part because they behave differently in people than they did in animal or laboratory tests.”2

Yet animal-based
drug data continue to be generalized to
humans. Some researchers will also utilize non-animal tests to determine
a drugs safety and effectiveness, but our government still requires
the outdated and unreliable use of animal models. This mandate has cost
untold suffering for the animals in laboratories, patients harmed or
killed from these drugs, and their loved ones.

THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY

The
pharmaceutical industry is a business, and like any business its top priority
is profit. This misguided motivation leads to irresponsible
protocol and eventually to human injury and death.

ANIMAL VICTIMS OF DRUG TESTINGMany animals suffer slow, agonizing deaths in drug testing laboratoriescats,
dogs, hamsters, mice, and numerous others. They spend their short lives
locked in small, barren cages, given test drugs, observed, killed and
dissected. Many are denied food and water. If obvious distress or painful
side effects are noticed, they are logged and nothing more; to administer
pain relief would be interfering with the study.

The
pharmaceutical companies and our government are indeed aware of the potential
for inaccurate results when experimenting with animals. This is one of
the reasons researchers dont always rely on them. The other reason
is a reluctance to shelve a drug that may market well. So if a drug causes
adverse reactions in the animal experiments, it is not automatically tossed
aside.

To learn more about how animal data fails as a predictor of human safety
and efficacy, click here.

DANGERS OF GENERALIZING ANIMAL DATA TO HUMANS Adverse
drug reactions (ADR) to medications deemed safe for humans based on animal
tests seriously injure more than two million people each year. ADRs kill
more than 106,000 Americans every year, more than all illegal drugs combined,
and are the fourth leading cause of death in America, behind heart disease,
cancer and stroke. Perhaps this is because the drug companies are a bit
too eager to get their expensive products on the market.

Click
here to read examples
of how animal testing has caused suffering and death to humans too.